June 14th, 2013 at 9:04 am

In “I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave,” originally published in Mother Jones and included in The Best Business Writing 2013, Mac McClelland describes her experiences working at a warehouse for an Internet company. She describes conditions in which workers are tightly monitored and work under difficult, even painful conditions as they are pressured to pick items as quickly as possible so they can get out to customers. Given the scarcity of jobs, the workers have little choice but to endure the difficult, frequently unreasonable demands.